We'd just arrived. Long trip. Hadn't planned ahead. We'd just hopped in the Chevy and left because that's what college students did; they just took off to
To much of the world, Nebraska, alas, is fly-over country, even if you're in a mini-van, so boooooring because the landscape is so featureless. . .until
Okay, maybe this isn’t
about Christmas, but Christmas is the season for sweetness, so I’m hoping you’ll let me tell a story that fits, even if it’s set so many years earlier in a land that seems ever so far away.
There’s a baby in it. It’s short a manger and a posse of shepherds; but I can’t help thinking this little story is related.
There must be a thousand stories like this more, in fact, stories about shady first impressions suddenly turned to gold. Here goes.
A woman named Anderson, Mrs. Anderson, was the very first white woman, she says, in the neighborhood of Native people mostly Dakota. It’s 1854. She has a husband and two darling children a two-year-old, and a baby. They live as you can guess in a log cabin, pretty much all by themselves.
Jim Schaap reads The Standing Bear Story
To be sure, there was a good reason for the Poncas to cut the deal they did with the strange emissary who showed up one day from Washington. He’d come to let them know that “the Great Father” wanted the Poncas to move from their homeland on the Missouri River, to Indian Country, what would become Oklahoma, to a place where, he claimed, they’d be safe from raids by larger and more warlike neighbors.
That argument was, for the Ponca, not total garbage. The Poncas were warriors, but they were few in number when compared to the Brule Sioux. What’s more, their culture was not as nomadic. They’d put down roots on the Niobrara River, literally and figuratively, planted crops long before white men determined agriculture was what they wanted all Native people to do.